For his research into research on the olfactory system, neurobiologist Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2004. Their work detailed about a thousand genes involved in laboratory rats' sense of smell. Earlier in his career, Axel developed a process called cotransformation, widely used in pharmaceutical research, which allows foreign DNA to be inserted inside a host cell to trigger production of certain proteins. Axel's half of the Nobel cash stipend was about $650,000.

As a teenager, he played for the basketball team at Manhattan's Stuyvesant High School, and he still remembers a game where he scored two points against Power High's Lew Alcindor (who scored 53). Axel has said he attended medical school mainly to obtain a deferment from America's war in Vietnam, and that he was granted his medical degree only after promising never to actually practice medicine.